THE STORY CONTINUES TO UNFOLD IN THE DIOCESE OF SANTA ROSA & TOO MUCH PSYCHOLOGY -
cultureshock Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 15:17:02
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PSYCHOLOGIST WILLIAM R COULSON SENT THIS EMAIL TO THE DIOCESE OF SANTA ROSA AS IT DEVELOPS FROM A STORY ON THE PBS NEWS HOUR (MARCH 13TH) WITH JIM LEHER
"I 'want to apologize as sincerely and abjectly as I possibly can,'
O'Connell said at a news conference. The bishop did not deny what Dixon
alleged, but described it as misguided therapy. 'What I was trying to do
was work with a youngster who had personal issues,' he said. 'We're
talking about the late '70s. In Catholic theology, there were different
kinds of approaches.…' Dixon replied, 'I don’t know what Catholic theology
says, "Let's get in touch with our bodies and take boys to bed with us."
These lines are excerpted from the transcript of last night's ABC News
20/20 Breaking Silence: Former Priest Describes Alleged Abuse by Florida.
I'm with Dixon. I don't know of such a Catholic theology that warrants
taking boys (or girls) to bed. But I do know of a psychology. So here is
my second reply to your query about my claim that this psychology invaded
the American Church in the '60s, including Santa Rosa.
Concerning questions one through five that you sent Tony DiGirolomo:
you're right to challenge any allegation of a connection between the founders
of the Santa Rosa diocese and the therapists of Sonoma State University
and the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute who organized the 1962 conference
on existential-humanistic psychology. (The conference was held at the Flamingo
Hotel August 12-14; I don’t have an exact date for launching the Diocese,
only that it was 1962.) Surely neither group sponsored the other.
Consider, however, the tenor of the times, not least in Sonoma County.
Having arrived in California in the interim from theWisconsin
Psychiatric Institute, I helped staff a repeat of the Flamingo
conference two years later at the El Rancho Tropicana. So I do know that
Catholics participated in both events and were influenced in ways that,
over the long-run, turned out to be bad, including in the release of
libido.
Panel presentations at the first session had included Carl Rogers, Rollo
May and Abraham Maslow. In his question-and-answer segment, Maslow said
that the difference between his own atheism (which he repeatedly
declared) and the churches “is no longer the great cleavage it once was.
… I would predict that church doctrine is going to be remodeled,
redefined, shifting in various ways, so as to conform more with the new
factual challenges that we are presenting through our experiments,
researches, and clinical investigations” (tape recorded).
There was groupwork along with the panel presentations and speeches.
Journalist Richard Reeves, surveying the “human capacities movement” (as
he called it) described a similar event at Grace Cathedral in San
Francisco: “In one ‘happening’ … a nun told of her struggles with sexual
desires and an overly-considerate woman, taunted in an encounter group
as ‘super mama,’ erupted for the first time in a rage against her
husband. The principles are similar in most of the movement’s
activities. … In body awareness, people may get down on the floor and
roll over each other, pretending they are animals at play. In role-playing, a man may act out before a group some unpleasant behavior of his wife” (New York Times, October 8, 1967).
You’ve asked us to specify the connection we claim exists between this
type of “therapy” and recent developments in the Catholic Church.
Maslow was the key, much more than Rogers or May. For his part, Rogers
later said the movement had become “thoroughly insidious in religion.”
Maslow continued to think it was wonderful.
He’d conducted research in the 1930s which included Catholic and
non-Catholic women. They were compared on what he called (and promoted
as) “dominance feeling or self-esteem.” A number of psychologists
continued this line of promotion, but Maslow was out in front. Sidney
Jourard and Donald Clark, whom I quoted in Wednesday’s e-mail, were
Maslovian in orientation; so too was Richard Farson, who helped organize
the Santa Rosa conferences and whom I’ll mention again below.
Consider Maslow’s 1939 paper in the Journal of Social Psychology,
“Dominance, Personality, and Social Behavior in Women”; there he
characterized Catholic women as being unlike other subjects he’d tested
(“Catholics are more conventional”). He described the extreme of the
non-Catholic group as follows: “Our very highest cases have sometimes
said that they had no code of morals or ethics. They felt they could do
anything if necessary, even to the extent of killing without a qualm.
They felt their own ends to be very important and were willing to
override all sorts of opposition. … [They] often could not remember a
single thing that they felt guilty about, or that had bothered their
conscience. ‘If I did it, it was all right.’ In the paper on sexuality
[his “Self-Esteem (Dominance-Feeling) and Sexuality in Women”] it is
pointed out that among the cases in this highest bracket, promiscuity,
masturbation, homosexual experiences, and perversions of all sorts were
often found. Not one of these women had guilty feelings about any of
these. Some of them recognized that some of their behavior was
objectively bad or undesirable, but there was no affective reaction of
self-castigation or shame. A typical comment was ‘I guess that was a
pretty slimy thing to do, and I guess I won’t do it again, but I’ve
never thought about it since, and it doesn’t bother me a bit.’ This was
in connection with seducing a very young boy.”
Maslow’s interests melded sex, morality and religion throughout his
career. In a diary entry of April 1970, he wrote of “Talking with Dr.
Torrey the other day and comparing notes — he the priest giving up
‘religion’ in the old sense, and me the atheist constructing ‘religion’
in a new sense. I made a joke that I paid rather little attention to the
church people and theologians who were still breaking away from
adolescent-level stuff because, I said, ‘They aren’t religious enough
for me.’ … As a long-time atheist, totally freed from traditional,
conventional, institutionalized ‘religion,’ and not having to fight
against it, not having to struggle to be free from it, I can sail out
far ahead of the priests to pure transcendence at the Being level, while
they’re still pissing around with celibacy, or whether they should eat
ham.” Earlier he’d written, “Let’s roar off the face of the earth for
awhile. Let’s play total acceptance. … As in therapy, where I guess just
this happens — we learn to open up, to not fear being laughed at,
scolded, punished. We learn to be naked and to show the secret scars
we’ve been hiding all along. We discover from the true friend, or from
the accepting therapist, that we can jump and we positively will not be
hurt. We will not be laughed at, punished, etc.” (diary entry of July
1962). Another telling example, among many others, comes from his 1965
book Eupsychian Management. Page 167 begins by referencing his field
research of 1938 with Native Americans — “My Blackfoot Indians …
naturally paired off into what they called ‘specially beloved friends,’
with whom they were extremely intimate” — then takes off as follows:
“Perhaps we can sort of artificially encourage this sort of thing a
little more than has been done. I’m still thinking that possibly
something of this sort can be done through sexual pairings. For
instance, it always struck me as a very wise kind of thing that the
lower-class Negroes did, as reported in one study, in Cleveland, Ohio.
Among those Negroes the sexual life began at puberty. It was the custom
for an older brother to get a friend in his own age grade to break in
his little sister sexually when she came of a suitable age. And the same
thing was done on the girl’s side. A girl who had a younger brother
coming into puberty would seek among her own girl friends for one who
would take on the job of initiating the young boy into sex in a nice
way. This seems extremely sensible and wise and could also serve highly
therapeutic purposes in various other ways as well. I remember talking
with Alfred Adler about this in a kind of joking way, but then we both
got quite serious about it, and Adler thought that this sexual therapy
at various ages was certainly a very fine thing. As we both played with
the thought, we envisaged a kind of social worker, in both sexes, who
was very well trained for this sort of thing, sexually, but primarily as
a psychotherapist in giving therapy literally on the couch, that is, for
mixing in the beautiful and gentle sexual initiation with all the goals
of psychotherapy.
“I suppose [he continued] that for these days this is a wild thought,
but in eupsychia [his proposed psychological Utopia] there’s no reason
why it shouldn’t be taken quite seriously, especially for youngsters and
maybe also for the very old people. I guess what I’m trying to say here
is that these interpersonal therapeutic growth-fostering relationships
of all kinds which rest on intimacy, on honesty, on self-disclosure, on
becoming sensitively aware of one’s self — and thereby of responsibility
for feeding back one’s impressions of others, etc. — that these are
profoundly revolutionary devices, in the strict sense of the word — that
is, of shifting the whole direction of a society in a more preferred
direction.”
(Think of Father Don Kimball. It may turn out he thought he was doing
“sexual therapy at various ages … certainly a very fine thing.”)
I mentioned Richard Farson, who helped organize the Santa Rosa
conferences. Also a psychologist, Dr. Farson co-founded the Western
Behavioral Sciences Institute in 1958 and later became president of
Esalen Institute’s San Francisco branch. In his 1974 book Birthrights: A
Bill of Rights for Children, he advocated what he called “The Right to
Sexual Freedom.” Children, he argued, “need freedom from narrow and
constricting roles if they are to enjoy their full sexuality as human
beings” — which meant , he said, “the freedom for children to conduct
their own sexual lives with no more restrictions than adults”; it also
meant society should try to accept not only “the idea of sexual
intercourse between children” but “the idea of sexual freedom between
adults and children” — a familiar development locally, and now
nationally. Dr. Farson’s argument, he admitted, would stir up “the most deeply repressed fears and the most powerful taboos of our society,” but
it demanded to be faced; for instance, it is a “myth,” he wrote, “that
adult-child sex usually forces physical violence and sexual activity on
an unwilling child. That is not usually true. In many instances, the
child is a willing participant. … The most ruinous situations are
usually not the sexual activities involved in the act of molestation,
but the community’s response to the act when it has been discovered. …
It’s not that easy to change society’s attitudes about child sexuality,
but it is possible to begin to decriminalize sexual behavior, to remove
sex from the law books. … These laws do not even reflect our own common
behaviors or attitudes. To apply the most extreme penalties to the vast
majority of cases involving adult-child sex is totally inappropriate.”
Later Dr. Farson apologized. His book had been published by a major New
York trade house and widely distributed; the apology appeared only in an
evening newspaper in San Diego.
Another example of the Maslovian complex was recorded in a diary entry
six months before Maslow’s death in 1970: “We must evolve ourselves, as
we take over from nature and natural selection, and be just as neutral
and unfeeling and nonanthropocentric as nature is. … I find myself
secretly entertaining all sorts of ‘cold-blooded’ possibilities … the lurking thought that wars and famines are after all doing nature’s work, that the world would be better off if half the people alive died. … One day we’ll have to talk about the exposure or killing of monster-babies, or even of healthy surplus babies. How about selective breeding? Who dares mention it?… How about facing the problem of cutting down India’s population whether they agree or not, e.g., by medicating the water supply? How about paying for sterilization?”
We were not surprised to hear Bishop Walsh suggest on the News Hour that
he and his colleagues had been misled by psychiatry. Spencer Michels:
“Bishop Walsh says the Church operated for years on the principle that
pedophilic priests could be rehabilitated.” Bishop Walsh: “…we were told at that time by the psychiatrists that it could be cured, and so we
would send priests to these various centers of learning or institutes
and they would be, quote, straightened out.” Only to offend again.
Psychiatry wasn’t the only behavioral science to make this mistake. Recall that Maslow had predicted “church doctrine is going to be remodeled, redefined, shifting in various ways, so as to conform more with the new factual challenges that we are presenting.” At the time, 1962, his “we” meant the therapeutic professions: psychiatry, psychology and social work. He wanted more. In 1968 he told Life magazine writer Jane Howard: “Face-to-face therapy is a luxury. It’s too slow and too expensive. It’s not the right answer if you think, as I shamelessly do, in terms of changing the whole world. We need more shortcuts. We have to teach everyone to be a therapist.”
And so we did.
This movement to teach therapeutic methods everywhere — this Too Much
Psychology — is not the only cause of the Church’s present distress; but
as a largely unnoticed cause, it deserves now to be addressed. Settlements and civil trials in Santa Rosa provide useful data: Don Kimball’s, of course; Garry Timmons’; the death of Father John Rogers; Bishop Ziemann’s resignation.
Three or four years ago I talked with Bishop Ziemann after Confirmation
at St. Anthony in Mendocino. I asked him about rumors of sexual improprieties at Mt. Angel seminary in regon. He told me not to worry: “I am on the board.” So of course I worried, the more when the press
reported the reason for his resignation.
Michael Rose’s book of interviews with American seminarians (due out in
May) suggests the role of bad behavioral science at Mt. Angel. In a class not unlike Maslow’s class on “Experiential Approaches to the Study of Personality” at Brandeis University, psychologist Robert Torres distributed to Mt. Angel seminarians a list of questions: “Are you comfortable using sexual words? Thinking about your own sexual story? What is your level of body awareness?” (Maslow’s earlier assignment at Brandeis had been for his students to “become fully aware” of their “undesirable or forbidden impulse”; to “repress nothing”; and as a brief
test of progress, to “imagine people in the class are all naked.”)
Required reading for the Torres class included an illustrated chapter on
“masturbation exercises” in the course text , accompanied by the following invitation: “readers who would like to experiment with some or all of the steps are invited to do so … try to clear your mind of thoughts related to the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of self-pleasuring and allow yourself to concentrate instead on the positive physical sensations that can come from self-stimulation.” A faculty colleague of Dr. Torres took a similar non-Catholic tack regarding sex; in the class on church history, a former student told Rose, “I remember we were coming up to this section on sexual morality, about what the Fathers of the Church said. We were reading along one day and all of the sudden the professor, a priest, skipped over a bunch of hard sayings on sexual morality. … He clearly wanted to give the impression that we Catholics are open and embracing, and that we can believe whatever we want.”
So we are back to the point with which I concluded on Wednesday: that we will have to learn to say to one another, including our priests and certainly ourselves, “You can’t do that.” Freedom will follow.
W. R. Coulson, Ph.D., Ed.D.
Consulting Psychologist (ret.)
COULSON IS A GUEST ON CULTURE SHOCK
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